Saturday, 25 February 2012

Quick Way to Verify your Build

Problem: Going to a new client you need to work out each of their enviroments, this can be done using CA, PowerShell and T-SQL.

Inital Hypothesis: Create a PowerShell script that crawls and maps the farm, and outputs the results. This should examine all the WFE and application servers and the SQL Servers. If should report on the OS, SQL Server and SharePoint.

Resolution: Until someone builds a better flushed out script, I am looking at the local instance of SQL (default) and the SharePoint farm. This script has been tested to run on a full standalone machine containing both SQL Server and SP2010.
Additional work could be done to crawl all servers in the farm and output the results. As BGInfo gives the local admin all the network and OS data, this script does it for the application software.

Additional work to do to this script is to loop thru all the SQL instances remotely, display a report or even generate a nice diagram and potentially change the background screen save with all the information on the server containing Central Admin.

Updated: 19 July 2012 - Add the line tot he script to show SQL 2012 under the version:

11 {[string]$SqlInfo.SQL_Version="SQL Server 2012"}

Updated: 24/02/2012 - I had problem in UAT where I was getting stange behaviour and I releaised somebody had changed the time on one of 10 SharePoint servers causing me problems. The script below verifies the TimeZone for servers in your farm.